The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).

Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.

Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.

Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy "production" because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.

Yes, it does. Second law. You need all of the energy that the fuel will store, plus more to run the process that creates it.

It's conservation of energy, not second law.

Either you're producing lower-energy fuel from higher-energy fuel, or you're taking base constituents and available energy and synthesizing a higher-energy configuration.

High-energy fuel is simply fuel that allows to restore more energy per unit of weight. Take more low-energy fuel and convert it into less high-energy fuel.

I still don't think you understood Phil's comment.

Presumably, you won't be able to make sense of this either:

"In addition, production of ethanol is energy efficient, in that it yields nearly 25 percent more energy than is used in growing the corn, harvesting it, and distilling it into ethanol."

• http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm

The problem appears to be that you are incorrectly imagining that the other people in the discussion are trying to account for factors such as sunlight.